In retrospect, it is telling that Johnson first mentioned the virus in public as an aside in a grandiose speech celebrating Brexit. He was speaking in Greenwich, London, on 3 February. The venue was chosen for its historic resonances: his theme was that the maritime greatness that enabled the creation of a mercantilist empire in the 18th century was about to be reborn. This was the vision of what Johnson had previously called the new Golden Age, the Global Britain that will replace half a century of EU membership.[...]
What is striking here is that Brexit is not a distraction from the emerging pandemic. It is the other way around: Johnson was worried that the coronavirus might take attention away from the thrilling prospect of a liberated Britain, shrugging off its boring, bespectacled Euro-normality, reassuming its native-born superpowers and saving the world. (Johnson’s Superman analogy does work in one respect: the coronavirus would be the Kryptonite of this triumphal moment, the mysterious, other-worldly substance that would render the Brexit state impotent.) [...]
Why the difference? It was not that the Irish government was particularly brilliant, merely that it was not blinded by an obsession that there should be some special Irish way of facing the threat. It grasped the meaning of the “pan” in pandemic: all, every, whole. This was something happening to humanity, not to individual nations. But in London, the government (and to some extent its scientific advisers) seemed to be reading a book called Why Be Normal When You Can Be British? [...]
Thus, to begin with, the extreme reluctance to go into lockdown. Even when Italy imposed drastic restrictions on movement, there was a widespread belief in political and scientific circles in England that the virus was somehow going to behave differently on the sceptered isle. As Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, put it on 9 March: “Personally, I do not think that such a large-scale lockdown would be appropriate in the UK.” Hovering around this belief was a notion that the naturally libertarian British people, unlike the more docile nations abroad, would not obey the rules.
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